Serverless

Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions — event-driven programming in one unified serverless platform

August 21, 2024

James Ma

Sr Product Manager

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Cloud Functions and its familiar event-driven programming model is now Cloud Run functions, complete with the fine-grained control and scalability that developers love about the serverless platform. With Cloud Run functions, we’ve created a unified serverless platform for all your workloads, so you don’t have to choose between the two.

This goes beyond a simple name change. We’ve unified the Cloud Functions infrastructure with Cloud Run, and developers of Cloud Functions (2nd gen) get immediate access to all new Cloud Run features, including NVIDIA GPUs.

When Cloud Functions become Cloud Run functions, you can write and deploy functions directly with Cloud Run, giving you complete control over the underlying service configuration:

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A new deployment option for Cloud Run: the function

Further, all functions that were created with Google Cloud Functions (2nd gen) have access to all of Cloud Run’s capabilities, including:

Multi-event trigger management on functions
High-performance Direct VPC egress
The ability to mount Cloud Storage volumes
Google-managed language runtimes, with automatic security updates on base images
Traffic splitting and revision control
Managed Prometheus and OpenTelemetry support with sidecar containers
Inference functions with NVIDIA GPUs

"The newly released Cloud Run functions with GPU support enables Python developers to use Hugging Face models without having to worry about infrastructure, GPU drivers or containers. Cloud Run's scale-to-zero and fast startup capabilities are a great match for developers looking at getting started with AI using HuggingFace models with just a few lines of serverless code” - Julien Chaumond, CTO, Hugging Face

Continued support for existing APIs, gcloud commands and terraform modules

Cloud Functions 2nd gen functions will automatically be converted into Cloud Run functions. With Cloud Run functions, we are committed to continuing support for the existing functions APIs, gcloud commands and Terraform modules (Gen 2). This lets you enable Run features on your function without having to refactor your deployment automation.

1st gen functions will continue to be available as Cloud Run functions (1st gen). 1st gen functions need to be upgraded to Cloud Run functions before you can get full access to the underlying Cloud Run features. Cloud Run functions (1st gen) APIs, gcloud commands and Terraform modules (Gen1) will continue to be supported.

Connecting your platform with functions

Cloud Run functions makes connecting your platform simple to build and easy to maintain — you’re only responsible for the code, we’ll handle the rest. Anyone on your team with coding knowledge can create a solution without having to package up the code. You can also choose from seven popular languages. Data scientists, for example, can get a Python script running in the cloud even with limited infrastructure knowledge.

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Edit your function in a new inline editor

Cloud Run functions keeps productivity high and operations low by making each function its own independent component, isolating it from directly impacting other workloads. Changes and updates to one function are unlikely to impact another function.

A common use case for functions is responding when an object is added to a Cloud Storage bucket. The function might generate thumbnails of an image or run sentiment analysis on a text file. But there are many other examples for which customers choose Cloud Functions: